The Times Announces a Fellowship Named for David Carr

The David Carr Fellow, The Times said, will spend two years in the Times newsroom “covering the intersection of technology, media and culture.” It is an opportunity, The Times said, “for a journalist early in his or her career to build upon Mr. Carr’s commitment to holding power accountable and telling engaging, deeply reported stories.”

The thinking behind the fellowship, said Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, “was that we needed a more permanent, lasting way to honor David.”

Mr. Carr, he said, was an important figure inside and outside the Times newsroom — a source of inspiration to those who had struggled with substance abuse, as Mr. Carr had, and to young journalists.

Mr. Carr’s “Media Equation” column had developed a large following, and he was viewed by many in the industry as a kind of journalistic compass. He was the breakout star of a 2011 documentary about The Times, “Page One,” in which his personal style, recognizable to virtually all at The Times — a blend of insight and scathing wit — became more widely known.

For the fellowship, Mr. Baquet said, The Times will be looking for candidates who share his interests, and his openness to new ways of telling stories, “and also people who maybe have an unusual background. David Carr was a recovering drug addict who came to us from the alternative news media world. That’s very unusual for The New York Times.”

The fellowship, he said, represents a chance for the newspaper to bring in those who have worked at other outlets, to share their experiences of what he described as “a storytelling revolution” across the industry.

“A lot of it is going on in the New York Times newsroom, a lot of it in other newsrooms, and a lot of it hasn’t happened yet,” Mr. Baquet said. “There’s a new merger of multimedia, great writing, video, even the possibility of 3-D stuff, that is going to transform the way stories are told.”

Mr. Carr died, at 58, after collapsing in the Times newsroom in February. The cause was later revealed to be complications arising from lung cancer. Two months later, he was cited as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

His success as a journalist, as Mr. Baquet noted, was all the more remarkable for the fact that he had struggled with an addiction to crack cocaine in the late 1980s, which he wrote about in his memoir “The Night of the Gun.”

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